The confrontation with the fossil unconscious

Gil-Manuel Hernàndez i Martí

Contemporary civilisation can be interpreted as the result of a Faustian pact forged with the depths. We are not dealing here with the classic Promethean narrative — in which Prometheus steals fire from the gods to give it to humankind — but rather with a radical reversal of that transgressive act. In reality, though it may be hard to accept, modernity does not ascend towards the light to appropriate it. However, it rather literally descends into geological darkness to extract from there the energy that will sustain it and kindle its so-called civilising lights. Instead of an aerial Prometheus, we are faced with an inverted figure: a chthonic Prometheus who, rather than stealing the divine flame, wrests from the material underworld the power accumulated in the death of the organic.

Above all, because, as Ramón Gosfroguel (2026) has pointed out, the institutionalisation of Christianity as an imperial religion in the 4th century brought about a profound cosmological transformation in humanity’s connection with nature. Nature ceased to be conceived as a living, holistic and sacred realm, and gradually became a space subordinate to humankind – one that was viewed with suspicion, demonised and in need of domination. From the 17th century onwards, this theological view became secularised through modern culture and Cartesian rationalism, until it was fully integrated into the imagination of industrial capitalism, where nature came to be understood as a mere reservoir of exploitable resources, yet equally dangerous and susceptible to subjugation and extermination. From this perspective, one can also understand modern resistance to descending into the psychic underworld—the unconscious—which is identified with that very same devalued nature. Both the underworld and the unconscious thus became associated with that which modern civilisation was bound to exploit, dominate, marginalise or overcome in the name of progress and the dualist, patriarchal and Eurocentric cosmology that underpinned the predatory project of Western modernity.

All in all, the central theme of our reflection is to transpose the material process of drilling and exploiting the geological underworld onto the symbolic plane of a genuine confrontation between modern civilisation and what we have here termed the ‘fossil unconscious’. From this perspective, the extraction of fossil fuels is not merely a technical operation aimed at mobilising energy resources accumulated over millions of years, but also an incursion into a profound realm of reality whose implications transcend the purely economic or material.

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